Select pictures from me to you...

Over the last few weeks I have been on a boat trip up the Sunshine Coast, to the wild of Northern BC, to a lovely wedding in a garden, visited with my sister and countless friends, and witnessed a beautiful sunset. What do I take pictures of? My breakfast, new shoes and my garden.


My current favourite breakfast. Soft boiled eggs on toast with dijon mustard and a spoonful of pesto.




The coolest new shoes ever.



Evidence of my successful canning journey. I cracked the first jar of pickled beans last week and they are delicious. I rushed straight out and bought some clamato.

And my garden...

I accidentally planted about six tomato plants into one container this summer. When I planted the seeds I was so sure that they were onion seeds. How wrong I was... But the six to a pot worked fantastically - less watering!

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Can the *bleep* out of it!

It’s been a beautiful, hot, dry summer. Short, as it only lasted less than two months, but I loved every minute of it. I won’t even complain that I had to work the whole time and as a result, my tan seriously suffered. At least I got to swim in the river every few days.

Sooner or later we needed some rain and it came a few Saturdays ago – the first rain in over eight weeks. All of my beach-y hopes and dreams for the day were slashed and I needed a good, wholesome, domestic task to pass the time. So I canned.

I was not a first-timer canner. I have done it before in my mom’s kitchen, canning things like tomatoes, dill pickles and brandied peaches. I still have a few jars of some pickles we made two years ago and they are still delicious and crunchy. We dodged the botulism bullet. This time around I had a few less resources at my disposal, being in my miniature apartment kitchen. I have no dishwasher to sterilize jars with and a tiny little stove with FOUR small burners – no big one to get that big pot of water really cranking. ‘Whatever,’ my head said and out I went to buy up all the supplies needed for such a project.

As I drove I not only figured out what I was going to can (peach chutney and pickled vegetables), but also the logistics of the job ahead of me. Canning requires:
-zero bacteria in the jars or the contents of the jars (done by putting the jars through the dishwasher or washing then putting them into the oven for a long time to sterilize),
-a hell of a lot of boiling water to sterilize everything else, and
-some toasty acidic conditions where nothing nasty can grow.
And that’s the basics.

I bought a big huge pot for boiling the jars, a jar-picker-upper and 24 jars, followed by a whole bunch of peaches (to cook and eat), pickling cucumbers, green beans, carrots, cauliflowers and a big handful of red chillies. Not to mention multiple litres of pickling vinegar, apple cider vinegar and pickling salt. Good to go.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that everyone should go off and can the shit out of everything they can get their hands on. Jars of pickles in the grocery store are easy, tempting and delicious. When I was a kid I used to sneak pickles from the fridge without my mom finding out because I loved them so much and figured they were treats. Therefore, I love having the power to make dill pickles with my own hands!
Bottom line, I don’t want you to feel like this is something you need to know. I just invite you to learn the basics of canning, so if the mood strikes one day you are up to the task.


First off, I had to make the chutney. Chutney doesn’t need to be canned unless you want to store it out of the fridge for months on end, so you could make this for yourself to put on top of your curry whenever you feel you have the time.
Here’s how:

PEACH CHUTNEY
Heat some olive oil in a big dutch oven until it’s hot and then throw in some mustard and cumin seeds. They will start to toast and kind of change color and when they start to go ‘pop’, it’s time to add a whole chopped white onion. Let that cook until it goes a bit soft, then add a few cloves of chopped garlic, around an inch of chopped ginger, and a chopped jalapeño. Let it cook on medium heat until it all smells fantastic.
Then in goes around four pounds of peeled*, de-pitted and chopped peaches. Let this cook right down on low (an easy simmer) so there is almost no liquid left in the pot, just syrupy, savoury peaches.
At this point add your spices. A few tablespoons of curry powder, a bit less of cumin powder, and a bit less again of turmeric. Maybe you want more heat? Some cayenne can’t hurt. Stir it all around and let the powdered spices heat up and cook a bit to release their flavours.
Next I added around four cups of apple cider vinegar, but if you aren’t canning that much isn’t necessary (it must be an acidic environment to can) along with about a cup of brown sugar. Let that cook uncovered and on low to reduce for about an hour. Stir regularly, until it hits a consistency of, you got it, chutney.

*Want to know how to peel peaches? Slice an x into the bum end of the fruit and drop into a pot of boiling water. After a minute in there, put them straight into a bowl of ice water. If they are fresh, the skins will slide right off and you will have naked peaches skidding all over your chopping board. If not, it might take a bit more effort to get the skins off.

To can, wash out your jars with hot soapy water then put into a hot oven for ten minutes or so, and sterilize the brand new sealer lids in a pot of boiling water. Next, put the hot chutney into the hot jars leaving about a half inch at the top, wipe the sealer lids dry and screw into place with the screw top lid. Then boil the jars, not touching, in a big huge pot of boiling water. Maybe around five will fit in the pot at once, and there must be enough water to cover them all by at least an inch. This is called processing. You want to process a jar of chutney for fifteen or twenty minutes. Then take them out using your jar-picker-upper (or maybe you have more high tech canning equipment than I do) and put them on a dish towel on the kitchen table, again not touching. The lids need to seal, meaning the sealer lid will pop down. You will hear them, sitting on the table, all popping down. If they don’t pop, they aren’t sealed.

So that was down, next up was the pickled vegetables. Pickle whatever you want, I have already told you my choices.

The basic principles of canning apply to making pickles as well. Hot liquid into hot jars, topped with sterilized sealing lids. In this case, the canning liquid is one cup water, two cups white vinegar and three or four tablespoons of pickling salt (or a similar ratio). Take out one hot jar, stuff in as many vegetables as will fit (you want as little air room as possible) and any extras you want to add (garlic, chillies, mustard seeds) and quickly add the hot vinegar liquid. On goes the lids, and then move onto the next jar. Fill only as many as will fit into your big pot of boiling of water and process for ten minutes, then let cool just like above. And continue until you have filled all your jars, or run out of vegetables, or vinegar, or whatever comes first. The vegetables should be pickled and delicious in two months.

Easy, right? Twelve jars of each took about eight hours.

Giraffes are my favourite animal.

Check out my new kettle!!!!

Summer Food.

So it’s seven o’clock, it’s still sunny out and I can’t wait to go outside and read my book, but I want to write something real quick first. I went to Kelowna last weekend for a cousin’s wedding celebration (garden party!) and in the midst of swimming, visiting and winery-ing, I had the time to buy a twenty pound box of peaches and ten pounds of cherries.

The drive home was stunning, the smell of peaches overpowered the car every time the roar of the wind got too much for us and we rolled up the windows – blam! Nothing like it.

But honestly, after sharing half the fruit with Kristopher’s parents, what are two people to do with ten pounds of peaches? It is truly a feat to try and eat that much fruit before it goes off... Basically, we ate peaches for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It’s not that hard.

How do I eat them for dinner? Well I don’t just bite into it like an apple while I’m eating my barbeque. They go onto the grill as well! Just like anything else I cook like this, it’s just a bit of olive oil and some salt and pepper onto the halved and pitted peaches and on they go. Don’t be afraid to give them a good amount of tasty salt (try Maldon Sea Salt, I can eat it straight it’s that good), it will balance well with the sugars. While they get the char lines the insides get even sweeter and juicier than before they were cooked. I insist on eating them with grilled pork (which always goes well with cooked fruit, ever had it with apples?), and have also had them in a salad with arugula, lettuce and prosciutto.

Being that we bought them six days ago, I discovered tonight that a few had some extra and unwanted blue fuzz on them. Not wanting to lose even one, I peeled them (put an X on the opposite end from the stem, submerge in boiling hot water and then again in ice water and the peels will rub right off), sliced them and froze them – along with two freezer bags full of blueberries that I bought at the farmer’s market yesterday. I love buying mass amounts of fruit when it is so fresh and in season, and obviously hate to let even a little bit of it go off... Freezing the bounty while it’s perfectly fresh will allow you to enjoy it in the fall. The rain will be falling and you will be munching on an Okanagan peach.

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This afternoon I went shopping in Whole Foods, which is a major treat for me. That and H&M which I love equally, but that’s another story. I originally went into WF for their sausage selection, which is out of this world. I get excited about this sort of selection... With maybe ten or fifteen selections, how could a girl not? I got some spicy pork chorizo ones and on the way out, was sidetracked by the cheese selection, namely, the bocconcini. Thus sparked the beginnings of the another ultimate summer meal.

This came first:

Lemongrass soda. To die for... The company, called Dry Soda , also makes a rhubarb soda (among other equally amazing flavours)! I have a friend who is a buyer for Loblaws and had told me about these tasty drinks many moons ago, but I had yet to discover and see them for sale until today. It was worth the wait. I also love that the box recommends you to drink it out of a champagne flute and gives food pairings.

And perhaps you can see what came next right in the background of that photo...
The above mentioned bocconcini cheese, two mind numbingly delicious heirloom tomatoes (a yellow one with red hues, and a red one with dark green stripes, both about the size of a softball), and basil that I only recently planted but is growing fantastically. If you have yet to eat a salad with these ingredients in your lifetime, I urge you to do so as soon as possible. That is what tomatoes are supposed to taste like. Oh, it’s good.

And finally, came the last two grilled peaches and the chorizo sausages along with a Georgian baguette (they are just flat baguettes that are a bit chewier).

I made mini chorizo sandwiches, mopping up the juices from the sausages with the bread.

Oh it was a fine meal. Please do try it soon!

And now I shall retire to the patio to continue reading. And yes, I am reading Pamela Anderson’s fiction novel/attempted secret autobiography. Hey, I read everything I can get my hands so if the hot pink cover attracts me in the library stacks, I read it!

The First Few Summer Days...

Last Tuesday (that would be the sixth day of July) the clouds in Vancouver finally parted, the temperature jumped about twenty degrees, and the entire city was slammed into summer over night. I finally got to leave my wool socks and sweatshirts at home and wear shorts to work, rock the sunhat and start getting some color on my still winter white legs.

I love love love summer time. I love the heat and swimming underwater in the ocean for as long as I can hold my breath, I love sundresses and playing croquet on the beach with my friends, leaving the doors and windows open all day, and then I really love barbeques and tasty cocktails in the evenings. I really really love that it’s still a bit light out at 10 o’clock making for days that go on forever. Love it.

I found this list by someone on a blog out there, someone’s summer-must-have list. I think I just made mine.

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This weekend we played in a softball tournament and the weather was perfect - I got just enough sun to stay on a healthy cusp of a sunburn. My highlights would be hitting two line drives over the boys heads, the cooler full of lemonade and vodka that one of the guys brought and lounging in the park all weekend with good people. The softball part was lots of fun but considering we lost three out of our four games I’m not going to say it was a highlight.

It’s no surprise that getting home both evenings I was in no mood to cook after a full day in the sun and running the bases. Saturday night entailed a guilty trip to the grocery store that resulted in smokies, coleslaw, greek salad and seven layer dip. I was starving and basically wanted to eat everything that I could find (sweet and sour pork from the deli? Thank god I held back). Unremarkable, really, but I solidly enjoyed it.

Sunday afternoon we got home after an unfortunate loss (and a delicious breakfast burrito from the concession) and I had all the energy in the world! I had big plans to make a big batch of chana masala to last for a while into the week. And then I accidentally had a really good nap...then insisted on going to the beach for a quick swim. Again, the drive to cook a big meal was gone! However, after feeling the guilt from eating an entirely pre-packaged meal the evening before I needed something to brighten me up. While I was napping Kristopher had nipped out and came home with some huge pieces of chicken marinating in something tasty and a bag of new potatoes. I rinsed off the salt water, gave my head a shake, and found corn, zucchini and cauliflower in the fridge.

I figure if you have a huge bunch of random vegetables that don’t necessarily fit together, forget trying to make one big dish and make a few vegetable side dishes.

Here’s how it went for me:
-Corn shucked and straight onto the barbeque, completely plain. I let it get a bit charred and hot, then cover it with a bit of butter and some salt.

-Zucchini tossed in a bowl with some olive oil, balsamic, and salt and pepper and straight onto the grill as well (pretty typical for me). Again, it gets some black lines on it and it’s good to go.

-The cauliflower got a bit exciting! Considering I had it on hand for the chana masala, I figured I could follow along that line. I chopped the big head into florets, put it on a big baking sheet and gave it a shot of olive oil. Then on went some cumin, coriander, turmeric, curry powder and cayenne – all my typical curry spices - and gave it another toss. Into a 400F oven it went, and when it was starting to turn a bit dark and toasty in spots I took it out. I had previously read a recipe that served roasted cauliflower with a sort of salsa verde (kind of like a dressing), an idea I liked the sound of. Instead of a salsa, I had some plum apple chutney from the farmers market (again, a bit of Indian flavours) and it was heaven.

-Lastly, Kristopher’s new potatoes. Normally I like new potatoes boiled and served with just a bit of butter but I had just bought some pesto (guilty again – I didn’t make it. Basil doesn’t grow on my sunstarved balcony this year!) and I wanted to make something my mom used to make. Boiled new potatoes, blanched green beans, red onions and pesto all stirred together. Try it! I made it without the beans and while I missed the crunch, it was still delicious.

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There you go: four vegetable side dishes that took about twenty minutes to cook. You get benefits of lots of different flavours, and it’s easier to get in lots of tasty healthiness. Admittedly, firing up the oven on a hot summer day isn’t exactly ideal but in hindsight the cauliflower could have been done easily on the barbeque – it’s just a big oven wouldn’t you say? We ate that dinner on the patio, no talking just eating and occasional sips of a pinot grigio in the evening shade - a wonderful finish to a summery weekend.

And that’s that. I just finished my mojito, and it’s time to take the dog for a swim!
What are your favourite summer recipes?

Spaghetti by-the-seat-of-your-pants.

A few months ago I went to a winter farmers market! It was on a very sunny afternoon, maybe sometime in March, and it felt like the whole of East Vancouver turned out to buy something nice. I picked up some salad greens with delicate brassica flowers, asian pears (which tasted a tad as though they had definitely been picked the prior fall and were a bit on the vinegar-y side), a t-shirt that said I BIKE YOU (picture of a bike, of course), AND.... frozen heirloom cherry tomatoes of all colors.

I was excited for these tomatoes, and I had distinct visions of making a nice, simple pasta with lots of basil and I saved those babies in the freezer for exactly three months (where they had to survive an evening of sitting with the freezer door open and defrosting a touch, but they were looking good). And last night I figured it was the night to do it. But dinner doesn’t always go your way, does it...

Before cooking, I had to get basil (which I haven’t attempted to grow on my sun starved balcony). At the Asian market down the street a few days ago there had been a huge bag of fresh basil sitting by the cash register so I went down with a few bucks, only to find that the bag was gone. Apparently you have to fight hard to get fresh basil off the produce truck, and this nice little store lost out to the IGA. The shop lady enthusiastically told me that she would make sure to get some the next morning, but I wanted to eat this pasta tonight. I substituted for a bunch of Italian parsley (for only fifty cents! I got to spend the rest of my money on tasty England imported candy!) which looked just like a pretty bridesmaids bouquet.

Yes, this is a recipe of ‘making it work’.

I was not at all put off by the prospect of using flat leaf parsley instead of basil. I know a great recipe in which you fry some garlic, put a big spoonful of sambal oelek and let it cook a bit, then add the pasta, a huge amount of chopped Italian parsley and as much parmesan as you feel like. I figured my dinner would be along those lines.


My pasta went like this:

Obviously, put some water on to boil and start the noodles cooking (I used multi-grain spaghetti).
I started by frying some bacon. Letting it cook so that it gets crispy and really brown will make things taste smoky so never be afraid to maybe let things stick to the pan a bit, perhaps make the crappy apartment smoke alarm go off. Once it was brown, I added three or four cloves of sliced garlic and cooked it until it started to smell really good. Then I dumped in the beautiful tomatoes that I had been defrosting in the microwave. They were yellow, red, red with black stripes, green - so pretty...and still very frozen (I was really hungry and in a bit of a hurry). I didn’t want to take them out from the amazing smelling bacon garlic concoction – what a waste of flavour – so I went with it. My pasta wasn’t going to be this fresh, simple dish anymore.
In went the remnants of a bottle of red wine left over from when my mom was visiting, although I hadn’t realized there was about a glass and a half in there. This sauce was changing quickly, and it was going to have to reduce* a lot to hit a good saucy consistency. The tomatoes would defrost but they weren’t going to hold their shape in the slightest, which upset me. Three months I had been looking forward to these tomatoes!

I got over it pretty quickly as Kristopher made me a tequila blueberry mojito (we ran out of rum a few days ago..) and everything was right in the world again.

So thirty minutes later and it was nice and saucy and the whole second floor of our apartment building smelled like red wine and bacon (much better than the usual gross fried fish and old carpets). In went the spaghetti (Jamie Oliver says to let a bit of the pasta water splash in, I believe he claims it ‘loosens’ the sauce a bit, perhaps making the sauce a nice consistency. I don’t question, just do) and the entire bouquet of parsley, snipped straight in with my blue scissors.

It tasted so good, we both had two heaping bowls full and none remained for lunch the following day.

Now, I don’t cook with recipes very often. ‘Flying by the seat of my pants’ while at the stove is pretty typical news for me, but last night I got thrown a bit. Cooking is all about improvisation and if something doesn’t work out – which I know happens perhaps on a weekly basis, sometimes maybe even a daily basis for us – go with it. The trick is knowing what tastes good.
Bacon, good. Garlic, good. Red wine (and lots of it), very good.
The ingredients need to be cooked in their specific way to make them taste perfect and full flavoured (remember the browning, the thirty minutes of reduction) - never just all thrown in at the same time and boiled.

Halfway through cooking this dinner, I was pissed that I wasn’t even going to be able to see these tomatoes that I had been thinking about for the past few months. However, in the end they made the pasta sauce taste tangy, with the exact zing and freshness that a tomato picked off the vine and popped straight into your mouth should have. That will never come from a can or an out-of-season tomato.
The flavour of those tomatoes balanced the sauce out, instead of bowing down to the richness of the wine and bacon.

So roll with your mistakes (always be sure to fully defrost!), but also learn from them and enjoy them for dinner!


*P.S. Do you know how to reduce? It just means to let it sit at a low simmer (it should be bubbling a little bit) with no lid on to let some of the liquid cook out and you will wind up with a thicker, richer sauce or whatever it is in your pot.

Burger with the works, please.

I lived in Australia for a year a while back. I got to live a block from one of the beautiful beaches in Sydney and would go swimming every morning before work, and then again after work – work was at a restaurant right on the beach.
Things are obviously different there. People will run down to the beach for a five minute swim before going out at night, they call sprite ‘lemonade’, and coffee is ridiculously much better and has cool names like a ‘flat white’...
But there is one very important Australian item that Canadians must be exposed to, and come to embrace. It’s the Aussie Burger.

First off, I must say that there is nothing wrong with the Canadian hamburger. A homemade patty, some good cheese, and lots of dill pickles (my personal preference) all make a perfectly respectable hamburger. But if you go anywhere ‘down under’, be it gas station burger shop or fancy little cafe in the city, and order a ‘burger with the works’, on top of a standard hamburger you will be getting all of the following:
-a slice of beetroot (that’s what they call beets down there)
-cheese
-bacon
-pineapple
-a fried egg with a runny yolk

We made some for friends this weekend with no beets (I felt like watching the downhill skateboarding race instead of roasting beets – another story) and caramelized onions instead, and I think the enjoyment was unanimous - pineapple and eggs do belong on a burger.

Not only does this make a tasty burger, it makes a big burger. This was my dinner, and I will not post the picture of myself trying to take the first bite out of it.

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Not only did the weekend entail a burger reaching a height of six inches, a longboard hockey game and a perfect amount of funk music, it included a best good friend donning a wetsuit and taking her kayak out to collect oysters! Being only late May and the temperature barely breaking 15 degrees, even with a wetsuit that water was freezing and her hands could barely open up her bag to show us the 20 oysters she had handpicked for us all to eat.

We shucked them right on the deck - throwing the shells back into the ocean for the dog to chase - and ate them raw with only Tabasco and lemon. And obviously, a big glass of red wine.